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Allow me to give you my eight best reasons why you dare not tamper with the backup budget during these slow economic times. Hopefully, if I am successful, a few of you will suggest to your CIO to spend more, not less, on backing up your company's mission critical data.

You downsize staff and have more to do with less people...the backup will be what doesn't get done.

That long-term employee you had to let go after 12 years gets disgruntled and erases some backup tapes on his last day at the office. Not Joe, not after all these years? Yes, it happens every day.

You get rid of the offsite service with your storage vendor to save money and have Phil take the tape home instead. Did you know Phil has been thinking about starting a company to compete with you and you made it easy because he has the family jewels, not to mention the customer list?

You defer buying new tape drives and tapes and the equipment fails more often and the maintenance contracts were cancelled too.

The IT guys buy fewer tapes. They cost $75 for one so they just recall the archive tapes sooner before the retention period is up and reuse them. Far fetched? I used to have a client, who shall remain nameless, who did this on weekends and paid an emergency retrieval charge to boot.

Morale suffers when you tighten the belt and people get careless and don't do things by the numbers, like backup for example.

That recovery testing we do twice per year? Gone now...no time to do that with the reduced staff.

We become fire fighters in IT, not fire preventers and that can be fatal.

Conclusion

There are very few things, fortunately, that can bring a company to its knees in less than 24 hours. But data loss or destruction is most certainly one of them. Data is your most important strategic asset regardless of the business or industry you are in. Whether your company is 3 years old or 103 years old, many talented people have worked hard to build a first class company. Don't put the whole company at risk because things are a little slow and the back up budget was cut. There is a quick, easy, secure and surprisingly cost effective way to preserve and protect the company when disaster strikes -- and believe me it will.

About the author: Bud Stoddard is president and CEO of amerivault, a provider of online backup services to computer dependent companies. Mr. Stoddard draws from twenty years experience in data backup and recovery services and his companies have helped support hundreds of disaster recovery tests and events during that period.

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